Management by Baseball

What do Hall of Fame baseball managers like Connie Mack & John McGraw have in common with today's business leaders? Why are baseball managers better role models for management than corporate heroes like Jack Welch, Jamie Dimon & Bill Gates? And just what does Peter Drucker have to do with Oriole ex-manager Earl Weaver?
Management consultant & ex-baseball reporter Jeff Angus shows you almost everything you need to know about management you can learn from Baseball.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Adam Dunn: The Rewards & Risks of Refining Outliers

You can never do just one
thing
--Garrett Hardin

In making adjustments to complex systems, as biologist Garrett Hardin says,
you can never do just one thing. Classic case in wildlife biology is the
Australia's seemingly clever counter-attack on the native cane beetle...a
non-native cane toad to chow down on 'em. Two problems: the cane toad is baboon
butt ugly, looking
exactly like some weird bio-engineered synthesis of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Cal)
and Rep. Denny Hastert (R-Ill), and without any natural predators, there are
even fewer organisms willing to eat it to keep its population down than those
willing to eat the deep-fried burritos the Baltimore Memorial Stadium concession
stands used to sell.

The more unusual the system, the more risky it is to pull on a pick-up
stick...if you don't think it through, it's likely to come crashing down, and if
you do think it through, it might just fool you and do it anyway. Normal
everyday systems respond better to crisp pre-planning, but the outliers on your
staff roster, the ones who have unusual palettes of talents or eccentric
personalities or work styles are very risky to experiment with. That doesn't
mean you shouldn't experiment, by the way, especially when their results could
be better, but it means there's a goodly amount of risk that generally
outweighs the potential reward.

So it's with a little concern, but a bit of hope, too, that I read that new
Cincinnati Reds batting coach Brook Jacoby is looking to address team slugger
Adam Dunn's way-over- the- top-strikeout rate (about 183 per season). Dunn is an
outlier the way a Taliban Convention in Vegas is an outlier. He's a platypus
amongst ducks, a Starbucks in South Dakota.

Brook Jacoby will work on
fine-tuning the other 24 players' swings, too, but his prior experience
working with Adam Dunn could prove his biggest asset.The
Reds hired Jacoby as their hitting coach Friday, hoping his well-rounded
approach will help Dunn and others rebound from a late-season collapse that
doomed Cincinnati's playoff chances.

Jacoby spent the previous four
seasons tutoring hitters in the Texas organization, but spent three years in
the Reds' farm system prior to that. Among his pupils was Dunn, whom Jacoby
first encountered in 2000 when the outfielder was in Dayton and the former
big-league third baseman was the Reds' roving hitting instructor. They also
worked together in Louisville the following season.

Jacoby said on a conference
call Friday that he has some ideas for working with Dunn. Will cutting down
on the slugger's strikeout total be among the talking points?

"I consider 194 of them a
little bit of an issue," said Jacoby. "If he were to put the ball
in play a little more, I'm sure it would mean some more RBIs and possibly
some more hits. It might be an approach thing with him with two strikes; it
might be a mechanical thing. I'll have to sit down and talk to him and we'll
figure it out. I'd like to think something could be improved there."

In some ways, Dunn is the Reds' most potent hitter. He uses most of his
6'6" frame to swing very hard. He gets great leverage and has had at least
40 homers in each of the last three seasons. He's part of one of the two
clusters of persistent strikeout victims: he's patient, tending to see about
4.25 pitches per plate appearance compared to his league's norm of 3.82. He's
not a member of the swing at anything crowd; he walks over 100 times in a
typical campaign. (Here's
some great analysis, beautifully presented, from Cyclone792 at the Reds Zone
weblog on Dunn's approach). But by trying to work the pitcher into a
hitter's count, he gets deep enough into at bats to get to two strike counts,
and once he does that, with his tall physique creating a big strike zone, he's becomes
Sir Whiff A Lot.

SEASON

PA

AB

HR

HR
%

BB

BB%

SO

SO%

AVG

OBP

SLG

OPS

2001

286

244

19

7%

38

13%

74

26%

0.262

0.371

0.578

0.949

2002

676

535

26

4%

128

19%

170

25%

0.249

0.400

0.454

0.854

2003

469

381

27

6%

74

16%

126

27%

0.215

0.354

0.465

0.819

2004

681

568

46

7%

108

16%

195

29%

0.266

0.388

0.569

0.957

2005

671

543

40

6%

114

17%

168

25%

0.247

0.387

0.540

0.927

2006

683

561

40

6%

112

16%

194

28%

0.234

0.365

0.490

0.855

Total

3466

2832

198

6%

574

17%

927

27%

0.245

0.380

0.513

0.893

There aren't a lot of batters like Dunn -- 44% of his plate appearances end
without a ball being put in play (walk or whiff) and at the same time, he's a
potent slugger, a bit like Darryl
Strawberry but better (a bunch more walks, a handful fewer whiffs).

But he's not a superstar. The Reds have had a feast or famine kind of
offense, and there's nothing more feast or famine than the strikeout/homer
combo. He might be more in the specific context of the Reds team if he yielded a
few dozen Ks and a couple of homers to snare a handful of extra less prodigious
hits in specific situations. In general, there aren't very many players
who produce offense at the rate Dunn does.

Note in the chart above the admirable consistency of the lad's output after
his partial campaign as a rookie in 2001. The consistency's especially
pronounced in the BB%, K% and HR%.

So he's an outlier in two dimensions: how he achieves what he does, and how
uniformly he continues to produce.

BEYOND BASEBALL (we'll come back to Dunn)
This two-dimensions of outlier makes him a particularly risky candidate to
tinker with. I've seen a few cases of this in my consulting. I was brought into
an aerospace-related concern that had lower productivity than they wanted in an
office that produced analysis reports. They believed there was a lack of
discipline in the office because there was a lot of overtime booked, more than
normal days-off taken and because they didn't get the normal early drafts a
month or so before the final.

When I nosed around, I saw that one of the researchers was responsible for a
vast percentage of (a) the work output, (b) the overtime, and (c) the extra
days-off. It was his work pattern (the other three analysts were near the norm
for all three, he alone was skewing the totals). The workhorse researched a lot
up front, started writing late in the process. When he was on a roll, he'd stay
late as long as he was productive. After a project was delivered, he tended to
take some "mental health" days. He was a high-performer but an outlier
in both his work hours and his pattern of grinding through a lot of research
before committing it to paper (ergo, no moth-before draft). But he was the
departmental asset.

They wanted to cut off his overtime and make him deliver an early draft a
month before the review draft. This was one consult where I was successful in
getting this client to bend to their high-performer's pattern. He just wouldn't
have been able to produce as much or as well if forced to conform to formal
"norms" that were essentially irrelevant to the deliverable's
timeliness or quality. I suggested that if they wanted to change his
approach to high-performance work, they needed to do it in ways he'd already
proved himself good at...that is, cherry-pick other practices of his that he'd
done better before than he was doing now. It's not guaranteed to work, but it's
less risky, and can sometimes remind a staffer of some practice she's set down
and forgotten about.

NOT DUNN WITH ADAM YET
The equivalent tool for Dunn might be the following. Between 2005 and
2006, his OPS dropped markedly in specific two-strike counts, not all of them.

OPS

0-2

1-2

2-2

3-2

2005

.417

.334

.497

.887

2006

.235

.379

.469

.783

As you can see, there's essentially no difference in the OPS value of the
outcomes of Dunn's plate appearances that resolved on pitches thrown on 1-2 and
2-2 counts. But there's a big shear-off in 3-2 pitches resolved and a monstrous
one of 0-2. But there's a context that's important to note, too. Dunn had fewer
0-2 pitches resolving plate appearances in 2006 (38 instead of 48). That may be
the result of intent -- being a little more careful in trying to avoid 0-2 with
certain kinds of pitchers, or it might be noise. And he had 90 appearances
resolved at 3-2 in 2006, compared to 80 in 2005. Again, perhaps a different work
style or perhaps noise.

But as a coach, it's well worth asking the players on your rosters how this
might have come about. Since Dunn's homers are half as frequent at 0-2 and 1-2
counts as they are in other appearances, it might be worth seeing if he
could develop a special two strike swing that the many top sluggers incorporate
(Ted Simmons & Rico Carty, for example, told me they did this). But there's
no more guarantee Dunn can add this to his repertoire without degrading his
success in other situations than it is the aerospace analyst could work 8-5 and
deliver early drafts and still produce at the high level he had been.

When the talent is the product, you always take a chance trying to make
successful producers more productive by changing that which may be the root
cause of the their success.

Have you succeeded with that in the past? Failed? Do you find it hard to
leave your Adam Dunn's alone or to find the formula to make them even more
productive?